May 31, 2001:

Off
for a two-week wander, to Chicago and Denver, for the Book Expo America
trade show, the Catholic Convergence 2001 conference, and various home improvements
at Carol's mom's house. Bear with me if things get posted erratically until
mid-June.

May 30, 2001:

The Roman Catholic Church is bleeding its arterial
bloodpeopleat an alarming rate, over matters that are nothing
even close to core Christian doctrine: married priests, birth control,
divorce, and a peculiar intolerance toward the notion that women are equal
to men in the eyes of God. The point I want to make here today is that
there is little or no useful debate happening on these issues. The secular
press is extremely hostile to the Ropman Catholic Church, and does nothing
but vilify it without benefit of insight.

On the flipside, very little is being said about these things in books from
Catholic publishing houses, because most such houses are operated by religious
orders or other organizations under the direct control of the Church hierarchy.
Critique of the Church is thus granted in near-monopoly fashion to the Church's
enemies, who have no more desire to be fair than the Church itself. The
best critique always comes from within. By forbidding discussion of the
problems eating the Roman Catholic Church hollow, the Church is losing its
best opportunity to foster reform, and at some point, when it crashes (for
lack of priests, supporting parishioners, or both) it will crash hard.

May 29, 2001:

Saw Shrek. Wonderful stuff! Grab the
kids and goand even if you don't have kids, go anyway. It's a hilarious
spoof on fairy tales generally and (to a lesser extent) the Disney way
of telling fairy tales. And unlike much humor and parody, it's not cynical,
but goodhearted in a weirdly reassuring way. The story is pretty simple:
Shrek (voiced by Mike Myers) is a bright green ogre with bad personal
hygeine and a Scots accent, living alone in a swamp. Suddenly his swamp
begins filling up with displaced fairy tale characters, who have been
driven out of their usual haunts by John Lithgow voicing Prince Farquahd,
who is trying to build the Perfect Kingdom, which has nothing but right
anglesand pointedly, no messy, disobedient fairies/gnomes/dwarves/witches/wizards/etc.

Shrek goes to the Perfect Kingdom to complain, and the Prince sets him
on a questmainly to get rid of himpromising that if he rescues
a certain princess from a crumbling, dragon-haunted castle, the interlopers
in Shrek's swamp will be moved elsewhere. Needless to say, Shrek undertakes
and completes the quest, picking up a sidekick along the way: Eddie Murphy
voicing a talking donkey. Needless to say, Shrek completes the quest,
with some complications and plenty of surprises. I won't give it away
(and I confess I saw it coming just a little too soon) but the surprise
ending is a delight, and not just because of the blatant Disney swipe
from one of my favorite fairy tale movies.

Shrek as a creative work raises an interesting question: When
does computer animation become too good? A TV show on the making of Shrek
mentioned that the animated Princess was a little too lifelike,
and the animators thought people would assume she was rotoscoped (traced
from photo footage rather than animated) so she was "dumbed down"
and made more cartoonlike. Certainly the animation is a masterwork, gorgeous
and detailed and completely convincing. When will it become so convincing
we're not dazzled anymore? Is animation impressive just because we somehow
know that it's difficult? If it stops being difficult through the intervention
of advanced computer rendering techniues, will it stop being impressive?

Go see Shrek, and take some mental notes. The next few years of animation
evolution will be interesting in interesting ways.

May 28, 2001:

Memorial Day. Is force ever justified? It's
funny, how the farther we get in time from World War II, the more people
start saying that it isn't. Go see Pearl Harbor, or pull out a
book on our troubled history as a species, and ponder the nature of evil.
It isn't just ignorance, as the New Agers like to posit. Hilter and Tojo
knew exactly what they were doing, and whyand so does Saddam
Hussein. The main difference is that evil guys today, by and large, don't
control large industrial economies, so the damage they are capable of
doing is less.

This is certainly progress, but I think it bears repeating down through
the years: Evil exists. It must be resisted. At times, it must be resisted
with deadly force. When we forget this, good people (like Bobbie Williams,
my mother's high school sweetheart, who could well have been my father,
and who died in the Pacific in the last days of World War II) suffer and
die. My reading of history tells me that pacifism has caused way
more death than military readiness.

May 27, 2001:

I
picked up an Epson Photo Stylus 890 printer last week, and I have to say
I'm pretty impressed for something that costs under $300. (Amazon
discounts it to $269, with free shipping.) The alternative was a color
LaserJet like the one my sister has, which is a monstrous cube that would
go mostly wasted. I print very little in color, and most of that is digital
camera photo prints for Carol's photo albums. And although laser color
is very nice, the Photo Stylus line was designed specifically for accurate
repro of digital photographs on paper.

You need special paper for that, and the glossy, snapshot-sized sheets
are about thirty cents each in packages of 20 at CompUSA. Given those
sheets, the repro is spectacular, both of digital camera snapshots and
of the scans of my father's ancient 35mm slides that I got feeding the
slides through my HP PhotoSmart S20 slide scanner. One problem is aspect
ratio: The 35mm slides are almost precisely right for the 4" X 6"
photo sheets (this shouldn't surprise anybody) but the images from my
Digital Elph have to be cropped a little to avoid leaving white space
on the short edges. The ink cartridges are cheaper than the ones used
in earlier Photo Stylus printers, and I have to wonder if that's because
there's less ink in them. Still, beware: Color ink goes fast when
you're printing 8" X 10" images! (Also, be careful how you feed
small sheets through the printer, and be sure the print head understands
where the paper will be. I got some bollixed up and the printer squirted
a 4" X 6" snapshot completely to one side of the paper sheet,
and I had to swab all the ink out of the printer with Q-tips.)

The printer does a very good job on matte inkjet sheets as well. I printed
color covers for some little mass booklets I laid out for our Old Catholic
home church group. The color was gorgeous, and my only gripe is that the
inkjet sheets are a much brighter white on one side than on the other. I
printed text on the backs of the cover sheets, and it just looks funny with
the inside covers not matching the rest of the booklet paper in terms of
brightness. Nonetheless, the printer is a big win, and while you wouldn't
use it to print out your novel, it's ideal for digital photo repro and an
occasional color item.

May 26, 2001:

Carol and I have been perusing Dean Ornish's
book, Eat
More, Weigh Less. It fails for us for the most part, because it
doesn't reflect our own experience, which has been that if you radically
reduce carbohydrates in your diet while eating everything else moderately
(including fats) you lose weight. Ornish preaches vegetarianism, which
is not a health philosophy but a religion, in that its adherents eschew
meat for moral reasons ("It's unkind to eat animals") rather
than health reasons supported by objective research. Protein is necessary,
and it's quite possible to remove virtually all fat from good cuts of
meat, with skinless chicken breasts having almost no fat on them at all.
But vegetarians will have none of it, even chicken breasts, indicating
that health is not their primary concern. I therefore respectfully ignore
them, and when I do read them, I adjust down the value of what they're
saying.

This religious adherence to vegetarianism gets Ornish into some tight
spots. He claims that you can eat lots of complex carbs and lose weight...and
then claims that potatoes and pasta (!!) are complex carbs. Really, Dean.
Go look into how pasta is made and then try and tell me with a straight
face that the wheat that goes into pasta isn't highly refined. To Dr.
Ornish, anything that isn't a simple sugar is a complex carbohydratewhich
is about like saying that any gun that isn't a machine gun isn't dangerous.

Outside his skewed diet recommendations, however, Ornish makes a point that
seems to be supported by objective research, and I've read it elsewhere,
though I don't recall where: Vigorous exercise increases your appetite,
whereas moderate exercise reduces your appetite. This is crucial. Walk
at three miles an hour and you will lose weight and feel less hungry. Jog
at six miles an hour and you will come home ravenous, eat more, and lose
less weight, or even gainand over time, destroy your knees. Vigorous
exercise burns carbs in the bloodstream, because the body needs energy faster
than it can be converted from stored fat. This makes you hungry. Walk at
a moderate rate (3-3.5 MPH) and the body has time to convert stored body
fat to energy, and everything stays a little more balanced. This has certainly
been our experience: Since we've been walking, we just haven't been as hungryand
we've lost weight.

May 25, 2001:

Forgive
the gap. Haven't had a moment to sit down and ruminate. But all is well,
and I tipped the scale at 150 last night. 150! I haven't weighed that little
since I was in my thirties. I've been walking more, especially this week,
sometimes four miles in one evening. So moderate exercise works, and works
spectacularly. (And we haven't even given up ice cream!)

May 20, 2001:

The
wildness continues. This afternoon, Carol and I found a bobcat lolling
inside our courtyard, against the wall, grooming himself and mostly sleeping
in the heat of the afternoon. When Carol entered the courtyard, he jumped
up on the stucco wall, but stayed there until she went back in the house.
The photo at left isn't greathey, I didn't want to scare him away,
and besides, a bobcat is a good-sized carnivorebut it gives you
some concept of the animal.

It seems smaller than the bobcats we've seen in zoos (about twice the size
of your typical house cat, and easily larger than any of our late dogs ever
were) and may be a juvenile. We watched our visitor for almost an hour.
He followed the movements of a lizard and several birds in the yard, but
seemed uninterested in pursuing anything, even though the lizard was no
more than three feet from his nose and with one pounce would have been an
hors d'oerve. We're hoping he'll come back, and ideally pee all over the
yard. We've had a serious problem with local bunnies eating Carol's roses
and almost anything else she tries to grow, and we've heard that predator
pee discourages small mammals. For those of you who have a small mammals
infestation but do not have bobcat visitors like ours, we suggest you go
to www.predatorpee.com. They'll
gladly sell you all the predator pee you want. Think I'm kidding? Just go
look!

May 19, 2001:

Want
more evidence that Japanese software developers don't know what the hell
they're doing? (I've complained about this numerous times before.) My otherwise
superb Canon Digital Elph camera forgets all about its drivers if you change
the USB port it connects on! I'm not kidding! Unplug the camera from one
port, plug it into another, and it insists it can't find its drivers, which
must then be reinstalled! I had no such trouble with my HP PhotoSmart slide
scanner, nor with my Handspring Visor, nor with my new HP flatbed scanner,
all of which connect through USB, when I bought and installed a USB hub.
But the Canon? No dice. Gotta reinstall. C'mon, guys. We know you're hardware
wizards. USB is a strong standard. Get on the stick and learn how to write
drivers! (Oh, yeahand alone among all my peripherals, the Canon Digital
Elph does not install its USB drivers from the CD-ROM when you install
all the other stuff the camera comes with. The drivers can only be
installed through the "Found New Hardware" wizard. And if that
wizard doesn't happen to come up when you turn the camera on, you need to
be very clever to get the drivers reinstalled at all. This is expertise?
Not!)

May 18, 2001:

Reader Graham Cowan sent me a pointer to his
large and very
beefy article about the use of boron as an energy storage medium.
This was in response to my March 8 entry, which discussed hydrogen as
an energy storage medium. (Hydrogen is not a fuel in my view because it
doesn't exist free in natureat least not on Earthand must
be generated by the expenditure of fuels or some other primary source
of energy like solar or geothermal.) Boron is interesting stuff, a very
light chemical element that is most often used as a light strengthening
fiber in composite materials. Kite maniacs actually use boron rods as
superlight kite sticks, which is the only time I've ever seen a hobbyist
application of elemental boron.

In megajoules per kilogram, boron is the densest chemical energy storage
medium we know of. It can be burned in pure (or nearly pure) oxygen, but
will not ignite in air, and its oxide is fairly tractable and can be easily
captured out of a combustion chamber for reduction and re-use. A boron-powered
vehicle could feed continuous boron fiber into a combustion chamber off
a spool and burn it in mechanically concentrated oxygen.

From what I can tell, this is all blue-sky stuff right now, but it's an
intriguing alternative to burning carbon and just turning the oxide loose,
and boron certainly stores more energy per unit volume than any kind of
battery we now know.

May 17, 2001:

A
pint's a pound, the world around, right? (See my citation of that old chestnut
in my entry for May 9.) Well, apparently it isn't, at least within the empire
on which the sun never sets. U.K. reader Chris Holmes writes to tell me
that in the British Commonwealth, the rhymes goes like this: "A pint
of water weighs a pound and a quarter." This difference in pint size
boils down to the fact that a British pint contains twenty ounces, and ours
only sixteen. I assume that this is the base of the difference between the
American gallon and the Imperial gallon, which is 25% larger. Ahh, me. As
I think George Bernard Shaw said, Americans and the British are similar
people divided by a common language. And while I have you, what word (if
any) rhymes with "pint"?

May 16, 2001:

The June 2001 issue of The Atlantic has
a good short article relating to the question of who gets fat and why.
The authors did public health work in Micronesia, an archipelago of small
islands in the mid-Pacific. Morbid obesity and its attendant ills like
Type II diabetes are taking a horrible toll on the Micronesians, and only
a little sleuthing showed the authors that similar things are happening
around the world, anywhere an aboriginal population adapted to an unstable
food supply adopts a Western lifestyle that includes abundant sugar, refined
carbohydrates, and the sedentary lifestyle that comes from driving rather
than walking.

People of European stock suffer from obesity as well, but it's striking
how much more sensitive non-Europeans are to overeating. The authors posit
that aboriginal peoples whose environment (for whatever reason) runs to
predictable feast-and-famine cycles have evolved mechanisms for storing
food as fat whenever possible, so that in good times they will put on weight
easily to carry them through lean seasons. The trouble is, the abundance
that comes of a Western lifestyle has no such swings, and primitive peoples
who have faced starvation over the centuries simply put on weight until
it kills them. Stability of the food supply has been a fact of life in Western
Europe much longer than in Micronesia, so natural selection has tended to
choose people who don't convert food to fat quite so easily. This effect
is definitely genetic, and therapies are in development that may benefit
anyone who gains weight too easily. (There are many such even in European
populations.) Good article and well worth reading. (I'll link to the article
as soon as it goes live online; I subscribe to the paper journal and thus
read each issue before it becomes available on the Web. As magazines go,
The Atlantic rocks, and I encourage people who are interested in
diverse topics to subscribe to the paper edition simply to keep it alive.)

May 15, 2001:

Lane
Tech classmate Pete Albrecht and I have been collaborating on an aluminum
casting to crown my concrete telescope pier up on the caliche ridge behind
the house, and I got it back from Pete yesterday with the last of the
difficult machining done. (He has more tools than I do, including a mill
and a shaper.) I did the last of the metalwork this morning, and finally
bolted the casting to the pier. See the photo at left.

This project has been underway for awhile; see my August 7, 2000 entry
for a photo of the raw casting before any of the machine work began. I'm
now ready to mount the equatorial head on the casting, though I'm going
to wait until I do a little minor lathe work to allow me to drive the
polar axis with a stepper motor.

Irrespective of how that turns out, I now have everything I need to see
the very favorable opposition of Mars next month to good advantage. Mars
will be at it closest to Earth on June 21, and will be larger and brighter
than at any time since 1988, which (ironically) was the last time I had
the big scope fully together and fully functional. I'm going to try to get
a photo, but don't expect too much: Planets are very small visually (unlike
the Moon) and are difficult to photograph. I'll have more to say about the
opposition as we approach it, but if you want to see Mars now it's not in
bad shape. You'll need to wait until midnight or so to see it, and it's
at its best right now at about two AM. Look in the south, in Sagittarius.
That very bright orange-y thing is Mars. Put even a small scope on it and
you'll see its disk. Put a large scope on it, and in quiet air you may see
its dark markings. It's a remarkable sight.

May 14, 2001:

Don't
have a lot of time this evening, but here's a pointer to a
remarkable article in Scientific American. It's about underwater proulsion
incorporating supercavitation, which means creating (through complex
means I can't summarize here) a gas bubble around an underwater projectile
or even (potentially) a vessel like a submarine, allowing it to finesse
water friction and travel underwater at literally hundreds of miles per
hour! This is one of the coolest science articles I've read in a long time.
Definitely check it out. This is going to go into one of my novels someday!

May 13, 2001:

Mother's
day. At left is Victoria Albina Pryes Duntemann, the woman who pulled
my life from the void, as she looked in 1948, when she was 24. Only a
handful of photos of her exist from this period, and most of them (as
you can see here) have been crumpled up in boxes in the attic for a lot
of years. As my sister put it: She was a major babe.

She was also caring and generous, and indulged her children in things
that mattered to them. As I've said in several other places, back when
I was building telescopes in the basement, she always had a dollar for
one more pipe fitting. She was a nurse all her life, caring for
the sick and injured at Resurrection Hospital in Chicago, but also for
sick kids, parents, dogs, birds, and guinea pigs. She had nascent talent
for art that she could perhaps have done more withthough see my
May 11 entryand a beautiful voice. As a teenager in Nacedah, Wisconsin,
she sang with a country band called The Prairie Chicken Chasers, and as
a boy I stood beside her in church at Benediction while she sang "Holy
God, We Praise Thy Name" as I was sure the angels did.

What more can I say? She taught me to be honest, she made me go to confession,
she played the accordion (!!) when there were horrible storms and the power
went out and Gretchen and I were scared. She understood the importance of
ritual and continuity, and when the time came to partake in the great, dark
mother's ritual of Stand Back and Let Them Fly, she stood back, and by God
(truly!) we flew. No good man could ask more of a mother than this, and
no God I could ever believe in would deny that she fulfilled her calling
to motherhood completely.

May 12, 2001:

I
am sleeping well againnot only well, but very well. In fact,
in the past week I've been sleeping more soundly than I have slept in over
a year. There's no consistent "silver bullet." I've been sleeping
solidly even though I have gone back to drinking coffee in the morning and
Diet Pepsi at noon. I sleep well now even on days when I don't exercise.
I sleep well even when I eat almost nothing for supper. So what changed?
I have no idea. I can only assume that some chemical switch buried in the
depths of my brain flipped, and whatever was out of whack before has now
came back into line. We know way less about the human machinery than
we pretend to. Keep that in mind as you tread with me the path toward middle
age.

May 11, 2001:

My mother died last year in late August, and
ever since then, my sister Gretchen and I have been gradually going through
boxes full of items that accumulated over my mother's entire (long) life,
trying to decide
what to do with it all. Nearly all of the things I have ever given her
(like a spice rack I made in high school wood shop and boxes of photos)
she still hadand predictably, I got them back. Some things, though
not unknown, were startling to see after a great many years, like the
hand-painted birth announcements she did for my arrival in 1952. The painting
was not done from life, but ahead of time, and had I turned out to be
Phyllis Duntemann, it would have served as well. (The "Wigwam"
was what they called the slightly eccentric peak-roof house on Clarence
Avenue in Chicago where I lived until I left home and where she lived
until 1996, after 47 years there.)

Other items were not merely startling, but gutwrenching. My mother's
high school sweetheart died in World War II, in a naval battle in the
Pacific, and there was a bundle of notes from him, as well as a shipboard
photo of him in uniform. I knew his name (Robert Williams) but had never
before seen a photo of the man who might have been the father of half
of me, as Gretchen puts it. A man who gives his life for his country is
a special kind of saint to me, and I hope I may have the grace of meeting
him in some ineffable realm beyond this world.

Nothing, however, prepared me for the bundle of yellowed notes that turned
out to be the love letters my father had written to my mother in the several
years between the time he met her and the time he married her. My first
reaction was the quick editor's instinct I have developed over the last
18 years of my editorial career: This man could write! I had never
read anything significant written by my father, and it was a severe surprise.
Frank W. Duntemann wrote to his girlfriend with humor, and conviction,
and passion, and at some point I had to sit down and take a deep
breath and wipe my eyes. He loved my mother fiercelyI had always
known thatbut it was quite another thing to see his passion expressed
in words on paper. This was my turfI had wooed my Carol with
letters like this!and there was suddenly a kinship and a sense of
wonder, and that after-the-fact exasperation that wanted to shout, Why
didn't you tell me you were a writer!

He didn't think of himself as a writer, because he was above all else a
practical man, and he knew that writers starve. (Her certainly told me that
often enough.) And it makes me crazy sometimes knowing that he died before
I could prove him completely, nay, spectacularly wrong.

May 10, 2001:

My
good friend and co-author (of The Delphi Programming Explorer) Jim
Mischel reminds me that these days spammers use integrated email packages
that contain their own SMTP servers, making SMTP volume limitations not
something that the ISP can impose. (See my May 4 entry.) You can in fact
write your own SMTP server in an hour using Delphi, something I've never
tried but should have remembered. So it's back to the drawing board on spam
limitations. Perhaps a POP or IMAP server could just tuck some delay in
between the time it gets a request to accept an email and the time it respondsI
don't know. I'd prefer an engineering solution to a legal solution, but
if an engineering solution isn't found, a legal solutionperhaps a
clumsy or even counterproductive onewill follow.

May 9, 2001:

I don't weigh myself much, and when I do it's
usually at the end of the day before I hit the shower. However, Carol
recently read somewhere that you weigh less in the morning than you do
the night before, sometimes by severa pounds, and I was skepticalbut
intrigued. So I weighed myself last night before I got in the shower,
and weighed myself this morning right after I got up. Sure enough, I clocked
at 153 last night, and 151 this morning.

Two pounds! Hey, there are laws of physics, and whereas I did get up in
the middle of the night to pee, I am lockbox sure I did not pee two pints.
(Remember the old grade-chool saw, "A pint's a pound, the world around.")
Carol (biology goddess that she is) reminded me that when we breathe dry
air in and moist air out, there cannot but be a net loss of water over an
eight-hour period. The relative humidity here in Scottsdale (where it hit
105 at the airport yesterday, and 100 up where we are) is down in the teens
somewhere. So maybe it's not so mysterious. Two pints! Morning, then, is
the time to guzzle. Dehydration happens.

May 8, 2001:

Today is the feast day of Lady Julian of Norwich
(1342-1416?) an English anchoress (cloistered holy woman) whose honor
is having written the first book-length work in English by a woman whose
existence is unquestionable. (Her actual birth name is not known; she
took the name of the church to which she was attached, as was the custom
for anchoresses of that time.) She should be a saint but is not, because
she dared to suggest that God, being all-powerful and all-good, will not
be content with losing even a single soul to eternal damnation. A solitary
contemplative and mystic, she saw a vision of a "great thing"
that God will do on the Last Day, the result of which is that Hell will
lie broken and empty, and even Satan himself will have repented and returned
to the Most High. Steeped in the severe medieval theology of Hell as she
was, she complained to God, "But my Lord, that is impossible!"
And God replied (to put a modern spin on it, and perhaps a touch of a
divine smile): "Hey, I'm God. I can pull it off. Trust me."

She did, and her signature affirmation is well known, even by those who
don't know who first said it: "All will be well. And all will be
well. And all manner of thing will be well." I consider Dame Julian
my patron saint, even if the Catholic Church's pickle-up-the-ass hierarchy
never saw fit to give her the badge.

For a nice if purely imaginative icon (in truth, we have no idea what Dame
Julian looked like) click here.
And for an intriguing piece of fiction telling the tale of Dame Julian's
adventures with a young vampire girl, see Mother
Julian and the Gentle Vampire by Jack Pantaleo. My friends have been
bugging me to read it for awhile, and when I do, I'll review it in detail
here.

May 7, 2001:

Suddenly, I can sleep again. I'm not sure why,
but I'm sleeping better than I have in months. There was no dramatic change,
no new drugs, nothing I can actually point to and say, "Things changed
here." Or then again, maybe there was something...

Carol read a book years ago, and I picked it up some weeks back, called
Opening
Up, by James W. Pennebaker. It's about releasing anger, frustration,
and emotional pain by simply writing about it. This process, called "journaling"
(a word I confess I don't much like) is nothing more complex than what
people used to use their diaries for: Writing down how they're feeling
about things. Pennebaker provides abundant research indicating that journaling
causes measurable improvements in mood and progress against depression.
So I tried it. I created a password-protected directory on one of my Zip
cartridges containing a sort of virtual diary, and basically griped to
my hard drive about anything that was bothering me. It's not great writing
by my standards, and it's not intended to be read by anyone, even me once
I write it. It's just inchoate bitching, about how I lost my godmother,
my mother, a favorite cousin, and two dogs in three years, about how I
lost my magazine (Visual Developer, nee PC Techniques) in
that same period, and even ancient things like how the Roman Catholic
Church mistreated my parents twenty years ago. (I don't hold a lot of
grudges, but I seem to be holding that one.)

I'm not sure I feel all that much better (and in truth I didn't feel all
that bad before) but I'm sleeping now. So something changed. This
may be it. If you're fighting depression or just not sleeping well, hey,
buy the book and give it a try.

May 6, 2001:

Woody Allen notwithstanding, my brain is my
first favorite organ, and like a great many people with similar
feelings, the spectre of Alzheimer's Disease looms large in the field
of things I worry about. Time Magazine had an
excellent article this past week on the "Nun Study," a long-term
look at who gets Alzheimer's and who doesn't, conducted with a group of
678 elderly Roman Catholic nuns since 1986. Nuns are an ideal subject
for a study like this, because they are a group of people with an extremely
uniform diet, regimen, and style of life, causing those elements to factor
out. Religious orders for the most part keep good long-term records, and
the order of nuns participating in the Nun Study had autobiographies and
pyschological profiles for their older sisters going back to the 1920s.
So it was possible to see what sort of young women these old women had
been, and draw some interesting conclusions therefrom.

The Nun Study seems to indicate that the more you use your brain, the
more likely you are to keep it. Also (and I breathed a heady sigh of relief
here) those nuns who, as young women, had written the most imaginative
and interesting autobiographies were the least likely to suffer from Alzheimer's.
Intense and complex use of language correlated to low incidence of the
disease, as did optimism and positive thoughts.

The downside, as with most studies like this, is that we can't be sure what's
the cause and what's the effect. Does using language intensely and well
in fact protect the brain? Or do people why are genetically immune to Alzheimer's
happen to have an associated gene for writing and speaking well? It's still
too early to tell, but sooner or later we're going to figure it outand
we'll have these nuns to thank. I've always liked nuns, and now I have a
good reason to do so.

May 5, 2001:

Polyester
is coming back. I almost couldn't believe it. Earlier this week, I had an
uncommitted day (what a notion!) and decided to do a little shopping, here
in the northwest Chicago burbs at the Woodfield megamall. Ostensibly I needed
a teakettle, of all things, but I took my time, walked all three levels
of the mall twice, and ended up bringing home a shopping bag full of stuff.
Several of those items were shirts, and none of those shirts were the canonical
(and wrinkly, and fragile) 100% cotton. One of them, admittedly, is made
of something called Tencel that I haven't quite figured out yet, but the
others are polyester blends like I haven't seen since the mid 1980s. There's
also a new color I'm starting to see that I like a lot; a dark and very
rich blue called "French blue." Some of my stalwart polyester
shirts that I've been wearing since 1986 are getting a little ratty. Time
for a new look. Let me lead the wave for a change, and sound the charge
toward rugged man-made fibers that don't need ironing! (Hey, don't everybody
line up behind me at once, huh?)

May 4, 2001:

Spam. What to do? Filtering is almost pointless,
since spammers have gotten diabolically clever at hiding keywords looked
for by spam filters. Many spam messages are now in HTML message form,
and put damning lines like "Hot barely legal Asian schoolgirls having
sex with llamas!" in graphical images as bitmaps, which filters can
only see as bitmaps and not as text. The further this arms race goes,
the more likely a filter is to filter out a legitimate message in error.

Prevention is the only cure, and here's my take on it: We need to get
ISPs to limit the number of email messages accepted for transmission from
any given IP within a given time period, and severely limit the
number of email messages accepted for transmission from any dynamic IP.
My suggested levels for these limits: 1,000 messages per day from any
static IP, and one hundred per day from any dynamic IP. (Spammers like
to use dynamic IPs because it's more difficult to associate a dynamic
IP with an individual userand could finesse limits on dynamic IPs
by logging off every hour and logging back on with a different IP.)

Think of it this way: The return on spamming (in terms of responses per
thousand messages sent) is microscopic. Probably one person per million
(if even that) responds to a spam messageso if you can ensure
that no one can send a million messages in any reasonable time period,
spamming will become economically ineffective and stop. I have personally
never sent more than about twenty emails in the course of a day, and for
those who might have a legitimate need (like editors of opt-in email newsletters)
special application might be made, with proof that all receiving the newsletter
have in fact opted in.

An alternate approach is to put delays in the SMTP server such that the
server will accept a sent message only every thirty seconds or so. This
isn't often enough to send sufficient messages to get any kind of response.
It's also a trivial coding exercise. The challenge as always, is to get
ISPs to adopt measures like these before government writes something like
this (or something less intelligent) into law.

May 3, 2001:

Like most people who have been present on the
Internet for a long time (and I've been on continuously since early 1994,
just after the Net was opened to the general public) I get an immense
amount of spam email. I don't read it; in fact, I nuke email on the least
hint of spamhood, and thus have no clue what a lot of it is about, though
I assume it's all bogus.

But if you've ever been curious what the nature of a lot of this email
might be, the LA Times assigned a hapless reporter to respond to
every spam message he received for an entire week (107 messages
overall), offering everything from college degrees to used golf balls.
His account
of the adventure is enlightening to say the least. He didn't describe
ordering the used golf balls (which might be a legitimate, if unwelcome,
sales pitch) but he mentions MLM pitches, phony degrees, quick weight
loss schemes, and (of course) various come-ons relating to sex. First
rate.

Is there anything to be done about spam? Remarkably, I think a final solution
would be relatively easy, but I don't have the time right now to write it
out. More later.

May 2, 2001:

I took a nibble of asparagus today, just to
see if it still tastes bad. It does. Uggh. But why? Why do some
things come across as ambrosia to certain people, and make other people
(like myself and George Bush) want to barf? I'm not exaggerating here;
the taste of many vegetables makes me gag. It's virtually impossible for
me to get whole corn down the hatch, and things like broccoli, asparagus,
and cauliflower taste so bad I have to wash my mouth out after forcing
them down.

There may be reasons, not that anybody in the health community seems willing
to admit it. I discovered some years back that I am mildly allergic to corn
branso my system is telling me something when it refuses to cooperate
in swallowing the stuff. Many dark green vegetables give me bad gas when
I eat them, which isn't as bad as allergies but still annoying. My guess
is that things taste bad to us when we aren't set up to digest them well.
I also admit that it might be possible to develop a taste for green beans
(which I find only mildly obnoxious) or even cauliflower, if I worked at
it. Hell, I developed a tolerance for cabernet sauvignon by forcing it down
in small quantities on a regular basis, and it does me no worse damage than
Mogen David Concord Grape, the first wine I ever tasted. I came around to
liking cooked mushrooms by forcing them down on pizza over a period of many
years. So maybe I should just buckle down and learn to like broccoli and
asparagus. (Forgive me if I don't start until maybe next week...or the week
after.)

May 1, 2001:

Why does DNS (Domain Name Service) have to be
a server function? It's obvious to me that our DNS concept is seriously
broken, and ICANN is only making problems worse and worse. I doubt that
the architects of the Net ever imagined that there would be many hundreds
of millions (soon to be billions) of different domains, and that
tens of millions of dollars and many court cases would be spent on tags
like business.com. In truth, the current system is unsustainable. The
good news is that it's also unnecessary.

DNS is just a simple, flat-file database that associates an Internet
IP address like 281.81.615.4 with a human-rememberable tag like "mackscafe.com."
That's literally all it does. Problems arise when you have a Mack's Cafe
in Providence as well as a Mack's Cafe in Portland, and both want to own
mackscafe.com. Who has a better right to it? Today we have constant conflicts
between trademark law and first-com-first serve, as it were. What would
be way better is a system that associates an IP address with a
multistring descriptive record, so you could associate an IP address with
Mack's Cafe, 14 Main Street, Providence RI and no one would confuse it
with Mack's Cafe, 5156 N. Cascade Blvd, Portland, OR, which has its own
unique IP.

The Real Names people took this
concept about halfway there: In case you haven't heard of them, they established
what amounts to a competitor to DNS; you register a key word or phrase
and type it into the URL field in either IE or Netscape. If Real Names
recognizes the key phrase, it translates it to the conventional URL, which
then goes through DNS in the usual fashion. But Real Names is really just
a band-aid slapped on a festering wound. What we need must go broader
and deeper.

Here's my concept: A centrally maintained but locally searched
database associating IP addresses with their owners, using multi-field
descriptive records to describe the owners. It would be an electronic
Yellow Pages, in a sense: You search for the Mack's Cafe of your choice
(making sure you have the geographical location right) and then click
the record to go to their Web site.

Where I differ most with conventional wisdom on systems like this is that
I would put the entire database on the local PC. Text records are
compact, and today's hard drives have capacities of tens of billions of
bytes. Make it the Master Index of the Web, and allow people to download
deltas on a daily or even hourly basis, automatically, through their high-bandwidth
Net connections. So what if it occupies twenty gigabytes? Assuming you're
not pirating MPEG movies, what the hell else are you gonna fill a forty-gigabyte
hard drive with? Why not make it something useful? "The Yellow Pages"
is an idea that everybody understands. Linking a text record locally to
an IP is probably the best way to keep the Macks of the world from killing
one another over who gets a URL that is equally applicable to all
of them.